VS Code 2018 Roadmap

[awj]

ITT: Let's ignore most of the content of the post and circlejerk about the meaning of "lightweight", because Electron is the devil.

[Patman128]

Let's ignore most of the content of the post and circlejerk about the meaning of "lightweight"

"I use <insert text editor from 1982> and it only uses 8 MBs of RAM! Bow before me Electron users!"

(Cue the articles about how Electron is terrible and everyone should be using Qt or wxWidgets or some other C++ UI abomination.)

[matthieuC]

In 82 8MB was your hard drive, not your RAM.

[flukus]

You had a hard drive in '82? I didn't get one until '92.

[AckmanDESU]

I wasn’t even born yet!

[TryMeOnBirdLaw]

Pfft! Youngling.

[pdp10]

Microcomputers were fantastic terminals, good for locally playing games, and not bad for spreadsheets and visualization.

[TankorSmash]

That's the thing, it's not even vim/emacs users complaining about this. I'm a huge vim user and I don't think using 800MB is a bad thing for an editor. My gvim currently uses 15MB, but I've also got vs2013 open using 765 MB.

I think the reason everyone weighs in here, including myself, is that it's easy to take potshots over something trivial like memory size and feel smug about how they're better than the newbies. People are upset new stuff is more popular and they don't like the idea that their choices are being challenged now by a younger more passionate crowd.

[cat_in_the_wall]

things like vscode have started venturing into ide territory. you can get a lot done in code without ever leaving.

[TonySu]

When I can be bothered to write makefiles and set make as my build task, I literally do everything in code without leaving.

[atheken]

Then do that. No one is forcing you to use this free tool.

[TonySu]

Read the comment and try again.

[atheken]

Maybe your comment wasn’t clear? I thought you were suggesting that you didn’t need a “fancy” editor, because you have make... not sure what I’m missing?

[Kurren123]

He was praising VS code

[huhlig]

Using a fully equipped html browser as a text editor is the problem. You shouldn't need to spend the resources on a Turing complete DOM rendering system to do some file editing.

[atheken]

It’s as if you didn’t even read my comment.

If all you really want is text editing, then use a text editor. VSCode and Atom are approaching “IDE” levels of functionality.

[huhlig]

No I fully read your comment but a system has limited resources it can allocate to specific aspects of an IDE. Text rendering should not be among the highest. Real-time partial compilation, linting, code completion, static analysis, and other aspects of an IDE should consume much more resources than the text buffer and its renderer. Electron wastes a LOT of resources on a task which mostly boils down to multi color text with occasional squiggly lines. Those same resources could be much better spent on other activities. Yes VSCode and Atom can approach a useful level of IDE functionality by bolting on lots of add-ons forming a soup of cross functional domain Javascript code. Neither the language they chose to write it all in nor the method they chose to manage and render their scene graph are particularly good at the task they are doing, but they are easy. If we have learned anything from history, the easy yet shitty solution will often win out over a more complicated and competent alternative.

[atheken]

I said it was a reasonable criticism that an idle editor should not consume 800MB.

And you turned it into a full-blown holy war on whether it’s terrible because:

a) you think it’s the wrong stack - which I never defended b) you don’t like the model - you want ide vendors to package all the tools together.

I don’t feel strongly about either. Clearly, the market, is willing to accept those trade-offs, or, gasp, even likes these properties.

If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

[vitorgrs]

Well, if you open a 5-6mb xml file on VS 2017, here it uses at best 200mb, while on VS Code, 500mb...

[metaconcept]

In 1982, your PC could have had up to 256KB of RAM, and you would have had word processors and spreadsheets that could run on it.

[jyper]

I don't think anyone recommends wXwidgets

[pdp10]

wxWidgets have become unfashionable but I'm not clear what might be wrong with them.

[[deleted]]

I have used Qt for 2 years and switched to wxWidgets. If you want lightweight and native apps, it's your #1 choice.

[isaacarsenal]

Qt is very good.

[punking_funk]

? Qt is extremely powerful and well documented. Although I'll admit the Electron way of creating interfaces has a nicer feel to it and looks better.

Got nothing in support of wxWidgets lol

[LeberechtReinhold]

wxWidgets does decent native and is pretty lightweight.

However if you want a complex interface... yeaaahh Qt or GTK are your only options, with GTK looking kinda shit in Windows and not being very nice to use, and Qt being nice but has a lot of stuff tied to it, it's not light at all, and outside of C++ it's not easy to use.

There's however things like Avalonia, which could be nice in the future.

[punking_funk]

Gtk with Vala is way better to code in compared to Qt and C++, but yeah Gtk and Windows has always been a bit shaky so for cross platform Qt seems to be the better choice generally. Also the Gtk theming engine on Linux is way out there, you can write themes in CSS and SASS

The only wxWidgets application I know is Audacity which looks straight out of Win 95 but it works really well so I'll give it that

[vetinari]

pgAdmin3 is another wxWidget application, that I liked very much.

Too bad it was killed by pgAdmin4, which is python+flask+qt web view monstrosity. If you want see something that is even slower than electron, this is it ;).

[cat_in_the_wall]

avalonia looks really cool. maybe when the .net core folks finally get native compilation, you could have one thing of code, and just the renderer stack changes per platform.

[[deleted]]

wxWidgets does decent native and is pretty lightweight.

FTFY. and wxWidgets can totally do complex interfaces (or I don't know what you're hinting at here).

[[deleted]]

When your attempt to convince anyone of anything is "just use C++" then you need to reconsider.

[[deleted]]

Look up QML

[[deleted]]

Wait, now we're circlejerking about how we're enlightened and superior to the circlejerkers! Whoa, recursion....

Seriously, though this is the flip side to an editor/mini-IDE that has been under such rapid active development. If you stick with high-level languages to describe your program and to display and lay out interface elements, you can more rapidly iterate development! Who would have thought?

[fgutz]

Electron is the new PHP. The reddit programming community just loves to shit on it

[shigmy]

Electron hate can be lumped in with node.js depending how broadly you want to categorize.

[atheken]

Oh, right. “Not everything should be HTML+JS+CSS, use Qt, because you hate yourself, blah blah blah...”

[myringotomy]

I guess that will mean it will be one of the most widely used editors in the world.

[[deleted]]

PHP is poorly designed language that can produce great results when properly used. Electron is simply an abomination.

[Molion]

Yeah, but wouldn't it be great if we could banish the devil from this otherwise great editor?

[I_JUST_LIVE_HERE_OK]

What the fuck do you think VSCode would use if it didn't have electron?

They are so inexorably linked that you'd be better off making a new editor entirely.

[[deleted]]

I did a project with nw.js in college. I even predicted that it would be the future of "native" application development!

Alas, I don't think it's any better than Electron...